Category: Sacramento

When you visit a new area, do you use Yelp or other applications to find restaurants to visit? Yelp gives the High Hand Conservatory (website link) in Loomis, CA four stars, and TripAdvisor gives it four and a half stars. Traveling and Blogging Near and Far gives it five stars.

To get to the spacious, moderately-priced cafe, you’ll weave your way through a beautiful nursery wonderland. We arrived at a good time, about 8:00 on a Saturday, after the early birds but before the late risers. Timing is everything. The food and service were so fabulous that I forgot to take pictures and enjoyed my meal. You can check out their menu on The TripAdvisor website.

As much as I love food, the atmosphere made the experience unique. We ate in the covered courtyard, open to the garden vistas and could hardly wait to tour the outdoor and enclosed nurseries as well as the shops housed within the long metal building called a Fruit Shed.

Have you ever bought a grocery-store succulent and two weeks later it turned yellow and the leaves withered and fell off? I’ve done this. Neither spritzing nor ignoring it seemed to halt the dropping leaves. If you enjoy succulents, you could pick out small ones and plant them yourselves at one of the outdoor stations.

You could find more than unique gifts here. Classes for arts and crafts fill up quickly. We walked into one class, and several participants allowed us to photograph their gourd projects.

For my quilting and knitting friends, one of the stores had plenty of “yard goods,” as my grandma used to call fabric. Loomis, CA would be a great place to schedule a retreat and come for classes or just to sew together.

If you watch American Pickers, the cost of junkyard cars and parts seems out of range for the average buyer, but nothing draws attention in a professional garden or nursery like a great old car. The cars in this nursery did not have a price tag. To complete your home gardens, you could find fun garden art at High Hand. I loved the lasered shovel. Ideas are free.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this brief tour of High Hand. Pictures don’t do it justice. It’s only about a twenty-minute drive north from Sacramento to the small town of Loomis, CA. The two hours my family and I spent at High Hand went too quickly. I’m ready to go back. Want to join me?

Featured Puzzle

If you are interested in having one of these pictures as a puzzle, check out my puzzle website. If you have a picture from your travels you’d like to turn into a puzzle, you can make it yourself or send it to me, and I’ll set it up for you.

A container holds something. A car holds people. Therefore a car is a container.

Smile, it was supposed to be funny. 🙂

Actually, the museum building is also a container. It contained mock buildings, which contained relics.

Container is a noun. Contain is a verb. Vince and his son could hardly contain their excitement when we went to the California Auto Museum in Sacramento. Uncontained excitement, like uncontained anything spills out and gets all over.

Have you ever seen such intensity? I couldn’t contain myself from taking this picture.

Their excitement spilled all over me, and I loved the museum, too. My pick for today’s visit – a classic Woody. This container even contains a container in the back.

That was a dumb question. As Carol wrote, “He’s had more excitement in the last six months than most people have in a lifetime.”

“I want to go whale watching, Mom. I didn’t see any whales in Europe or Australia. I didn’t even see one on the plane back to the United States. I’ve been a lot of places, Mom, and guess what?

“What, Manny?

“No whales, that’s what.”

“That’s all you have to say about all your wonderful travels, and about the amazing people you met and things you saw?”

“Oh, Mom. I love Carol and Glenn, AND MELISSA, and Ute and Ralph, and I had a great time, but did you know that Justin Beaver has his own website?”

“I think you mentioned it at least one hundred times before you left. You saw how much work he does to make that website didn’t you? Are you sure you want to do that? Did you tell all those people thank you for the wonderful time you had? I even saw you on Justin’s website eating chocolate, and having fun.”

“When I get all my pictures in order, I’m going to have a website and talk about all my travels. And I’m going to write books, and make a movie, and be famous like the Eternal Traveler and Justin Beaver.”

“Uh huh. Did you say thank you to Carol and Glenn for taking you all over Europe, New Zealand, and Australia? Did you thank Melissa for bringing you home?”

“Yeah, Mom. I love those people. I kissed Melissa, even. I didn’t kiss Justin, but I shook his hand. I gave Carol and Glenn a big hug. But I didn’t see any whales yet. Let’s go to Hawaii.”

Am I too late to post a quick post about costumes? Alisa’s travel theme for last week fits a good many pictures I have. In my collection I have pictures of costumes with and without people. To see the ones without costumes I have two posts, one on WP and one on Hubpages.com written about my wonderful tour of Evengeline’s Costume Mansion in Sacramento. Real people (or animals) wear costumes, so this post will focus on living models wearing costumes.

The new Marsha ??? I photoshopped her arm joint seams, but she still looks rather … dead.

I’ll start with the last ones that I’ve seen, in Hawaii, since Lisa said she wasn’t bored with Hawaii yet. I haven’t written this post yet, but we attended a dedication ceremony for a new building in the McBryde Botanical Garden. Some of the people participating in the ceremony wore native dress.

Native dress for the men included tattoos, and for some, t-shirts.

~~~~ I got a little shaky taking this picture. I had my zoom extended out to 270 mm. ~~~ OK that’s one excuse haha! 🙂

The girls that sang had their costumes wrapped around them. It reminded me of a church play, where the church costume designer didn’t really go all out with the costumes, but the cute factor was still there.

The women didn’t get as into the total costume as the young man did. Does it look like he’s glaring at me? It was a very solemn ceremony.

Compare the religious ceremony to a commercial situation with people dressed in native costume at a luau.

The tattoos are still there.

The costumes were more complete, and dramatic, even for the men.

These girls were having fun being all dressed up. A little gossip passes the time nicely! “Can you believe what ___ did at school today?”

People from all over the world love to dress up and dance. At our CCSS Conference in March, we saw Mexican Folklorico dancers in their bright costumes and smiling faces.

These beautiful dancers were dancing at a Thai festival in San Francisco on May 12th in Union Square.

I hope you enjoyed my choice of costumes to share with you. If you didn’t see the rest of the costumes, check out Alisa’s travel theme.

As I pushed the publish button the notice came up that this is my 300th post! Thanks everyone for sticking with me for that long!!!! 🙂

This challenge is a bit of a stretch for me. When I was about 4 or 5 I got into quite a bit of trouble when I set my doll bed on fire, then started to carry the flaming blanket to the bathroom to douse the flame in the sink because I knew that water put out fire. I don’t know HOW my mom found out about it, but she ran in, saw me starting towards the bathroom, and threw everything out the window. I think I also started a fire outside once, too.

But neither of those events could hold a candle to the time we came home from my friend, Wyla’s, wedding to find fire trucks at the end of our street. We lived at the end of our street. My friend Gary, a volunteer fireman, decided to pay us a visit that day, even though we were not home. He climbed through a window to get in. He was calmly sitting playing the piano when he smelled smoke. It took him three misdials to finally reach the Portland Fire Department, but he saved our home. I was finishing up the last of Wyla’s trousseau and we were almost late for the wedding. In my haste to get to the wedding on time, I had left the iron plugged in my attic sewing room, and the faulty old wiring in either the iron or the house, sparked and caught the tons of patterns I had stored in the attic on fire.

With all that fascination with fire in my younger years, you would think that I could find ONE fire picture. And I did. ONE. And it’s blurry. I tried to sharpen it up, and it’s sort of pixellated. Sorry!!! This was a great place, though. The owners of this place are members of the Tulare County Historical Society, and they had their own museum specializing in old cars and old slot machines, and clocks. Of course old cars needed old gas.

Here’s one of his flaming hot cars!!!

I thought about getting V’s ghost flames on his Nova, but do you think they would show up for a picture? No – they were ghost flames. They didn’t even show up!!

I decided to display some HOT outfits that I found in Old Sacramento. Would that count???

Or maybe this outfit?

So I know that’s pushing it to come up with fire, but honestly it was the best I could do!!!